Open Water and the Comfort Zone
I was a squad swimmer in my early teens. I have almost no memory of it at all, despite going every morning and some afternoons for a fair time. I found it boring at the start, I wasn’t good enough at it to garner much coaching attention and by the end I actively hated it. It is the only sport I have ever stopped doing through active dislike of the sport.
Fastfoward to my mid 40s, I wasn’t thrilled to find out I’d have to swim for a CrossFit style teams competition I was doing. My whole attitude towards exercise and training has shifted a fair bit, really from when I started competitively coaching elite teams. The thought process of always looking for the undiscovered edge or overlooked advantage has led me to being a pretty curious sort of athlete. I’ll try anything and see if it fits. Stretching, lifting weights, 4 x 400 Norwegian method, ice baths, saunas, meditation, sleep, I’m interested in it all. Adding swimming wasn’t that much of a stretch.
Yes, I am aware that a whole heap of those things attract a particular stereotype of male, there is no way of getting around it. But I like feeling good! I feel way better than I did in my 30s and I feel the more I get into middle age the more I keep an open mind and try and learn new things, the better off I’ll be. It is like an extended version of what we do on the podcast. Initially listening to new music was hard, now I struggle to go back, the 1995 draft we did was not as much fun as I’d hoped, nowhere near as good as the thrill of getting a new god tier album.
Anyway, back to 2 years ago. I don’t like to completely suck at anything I’m doing, so I jumped in to pool sessions with 2 other guys from the gym. I absolutely sucked. I sucked in a way that had me convinced I might drown at the comp, but the sessions were fun. Banter in between each set. Lots of breaks and variety and slowly, slowly I started to improve. After that comp, one of the boys signed up for a half ironman so we kept swimming and I really improved, to the point where a swim session once a week felt like an essential part of training. Easier on the body, a nice active break from lifting or the punishing explosive movements that CrossFit loves. Then a day where I had a crack at 1500m straight. It absolutely wrecked me, I felt about as drained as I had ever felt from one effort. I just kept going though and one day realised, do I actually like swimming? The answer is yes, as long as it was a once or twice a week session to supplement other things.
About 6 months ago, someone suggested I should do an open water swim, there are several ‘fun swims’ in our region, from 1km to 5km. 5km sounded insane, 1km seemed a bit too easy and 2km sounded bloody challenging. I could do 2km in the pool fine at an easy pace, but the safety blanket of that black line and a wall to grab if you needed seemed very different from murky water, arms and legs everywhere and having to spot blobbing oversized floaties in an ocean. The same open mind that we approach the podcast with meant I signed up 5 months out and barely gave it a second thought, other than building longer distances into my swims.
Event weekend was a different story though. Noosa had a session for new ocean swimmers on the Saturday. It was run by three olympic swimmers, which was awesome to have that experience, but lets just say they might not have been able to get into the mind of a first timer that well. I was both more confident and less confident at the same time. The tips and tricks they gave out were fantastic and being in the ocean for 1 and a half hours at least 500m from shore gave me more confidence if I had to stop and rest, but damn, I couldn’t see a thing and having my arms and feet slapped in such a small group did not bode well for taking off in a group of 50-100 swimmers. The nerves were building.
Event day (I can’t call this race day, because folks, I was not in competition with anyone) and I was jittery as hell. The coach in me was telling me to fuel up and hydrate but my stomach and brain had other ideas. In the end, the only thing that helped was a podcast and I finally settled enough to eat. I used all the mental tactics I recommend to my players as I lined up to get my cap and sign in. 3 last minute toilet stops later and I was lined up on the far right of the group to take advantage of the sweep at Noosa, doing my breathing to calm my heart rate and then we were off. I have never started so slowly in all my life, all I was focused on was keeping calm and settling into a stroke. I did not want to feel cooked with 1500m to go. The goal was just to swim as easily as possible on the way out, stay away from packs of people and not zig zag like drunk coming home at 3am. All those tips helped! I sighted every marker and shaved them with my inside shoulder. I kept the pack on the left where I could site with my natural breathing. I turned the halfway leg and actually felt like I had a bit to go with, especially as the swell you battle on the way out is giving you a mini boost every now and then coming home. Rounding the gate and coming home I tried to push, but those markers were a lot further from the beach than I thought and it was a looooong time before I was into the break and staggering up the beach with a sort euphoric accomplishment.
After, reflecting, it was a great experience, from first crappy, gasping 25m to finishing. I was nervous beyond belief, mainly because I had genuinely no idea how it would go. On the flip side, it was genuinely enjoyable once I did the turn from home and knew I wasn’t going to flail about and need to be rescued, that the work I had done was actually paying off, in the end I swam about 7 minutes faster than the goal I had set after training Saturday and about 3 min faster than my best pool 2km time. On of my favourite articles is about former NBA players Kyle Korver and the Japanese idea of misogi, of once a year doing something that pushes you beyond your limits. This is absolutely the baby version of it, but I understand the appeal. Hopefully this won’t be the last one I do.